No
doubt, in many ways, today is the best time in modern history of
India to be a girl. Opportunities for a girl's successes are as
unlimited as her dreams. Girls are defying all odds and showing
killer Instincts. PV Sindhu, Sakshi Malik and Dipa Karmakar became
the unlikely heroines and saved the country's pride from returning
empty-handed from the Rio Olympics for the first time since
Barcelona 1992. The trio notched a few firsts for India; Sindhu, at
21, became the youngest to win an Olympic medal, a silver which was
never achieved in badminton; and Sakshi's bronze was also a first for
women's wrestling. India's first female gymnast Dipa went on to miss
a bronze by 0.15 points but her clean finish in the high-risk
Produnova Vault won the hearts of the nation. Yet an alarm is
sounding, revealing a disturbing portrait of millions of girls
missing and others struggling.

It
is difficult to determine how many girl children are missing due to
female infanticide, selective abortion or contraceptive uses. Table
1, however, clearly indicates that in the last three censuses, India
has witnessed an alarming increase in the missing girls. It is
estimated thataround
3 milliongirls
in age group 0-6 have gone missing in 2011 Census.In
other words, during 2001-11, on an average, the number of girls that
were missing in India was 300,000 per year or 820 per day.The
number of missing girls for consecutive census periods 1981-91 and
1991-2001 were 0.5 million and 2 million, respectively.

As
a result India is among the countries with the worst child sex ratios
in the world. The 2011 census
showed that the child
sex ratio, number of girls per 1,000 boys between the ages 0-6, has
dipped from 945 girls in 1991 to 919 girls in 2011 (Table 1).

Table
1: Trends in population in 0-6 age group, Child Sex Ratio and
estimates of missing girls (0-6 years) in India, 1991-2011.

Latest
Census numbers also cast a shadow on the adequacy of measures which
are helping in educating people to not prefer sons over daughters. As
per my estimates, there are fair chances that CSR will decline
further and it may be less than even 900 girls per 1000 boys in the
Census 2021.1
And this poses new set of challenges to the policy makers, programme
managers and civil society organizations.

Now
question arises: How to arrest the epidemic of missing girl children?
Recently, India's Women and Child Development Minister
Maneka Gandhi suggested registering the sex of every child in the
womb to ensure the girl child is not killed. In other words, she
suggested that child sex determination during pregnancy be made
compulsory, the gender of the child registered right from that
moment, and the birth be tracked. 2
It appears that she probably did not understand the complex calculus
that Indian would-be parents go through - when to have a child, how
many, and boy or girl. A glimpse into this intriguing decision-making
process undertaken by about 25 million parents every year is
provided by the Census 2011 data.

Table
2 reveals that among women who had only one child, the sex ratio was
just 782 girls to every 1,000 boys born. This is much lower than the
overall sex ratio of the population (943 females for every 1,000
males), and even lower than the sex ratio for children aged up to six
years (919). But it is not yet the rock bottom. For women who have
two children, the sex ratio plummets to 720 girls for every 1,000
boys. However, with women who have three children, it improves to
814. For women with four children, it improves further to 944 and by
five children, it reaches 1,005 girls for 1,000 boys, and the gap has
increased between 2001 and 2011.

Table
2: Calculus of choice – lesser the number of children in a family,
worse the sex ratio.

Table
2 indicates that the sex ratio is poor when women have one or two
children, but gets better as they have more children. Two factors are
at play here, according to population expert, Prof. PM Kulkarni.
One is sex-selective abortions and the other is sex-selective
"stopping practices", which is stopping having children
based on sex of those born. "Those women who stop childbearing
if the first one or two births are sons remain in the category of 1-2
children and those who go on for another child because the first two
or three births are daughters get into the category of 3 or more
children (that is, there is selectivity). As a result, the sex ratio
of children of women with one or two children becomes highly
masculine and, for the children of women with 3 or more children,
less masculine. 3

A
survey, conducted by the Forum for Population Action in a community
inhabited by the middle and lower classes in Jaipur, Rajasthan,
India in 2010, also revealed a similar pattern (Table 3). The
main objective of the survey was to understand the fertility
preferences and contraceptive uses. Around 200 couples were selected
randomly with the help of local telephone directory who married
between 1990 and 1995. Though the sample size is small, findings
indicate a strong preference for sons as well as of the small family
norms. The
survey findings clearly indicate that Indian women with son (s)
are more likely to stop having children than those with any
daughters; also indicate a strong relationship between family size
and the proportion of female children in a family.

Table
3: Distribution of couples by number of children, Jaipur, India 2010.

The
foregoing analysis, based on the census and survey findings, clearly
indicates that once couples in modern India have desired number
of son(s), they do not go for another child. And that is an important
intermediate factor contributing in lowering the CSR in India. In
other words, the
daughter aversion is essentially an outcome of desire of small family
coupled with son preference. To achieve the objective, couples
adopt various measures including infanticide, selective abortion and
contraceptive use. An analysis of National Family Health Survey-3
data indicate that sex
ratios of all last births and last births of sterilized women show
clearly that couples typically stop having children once they have
the desired number of sons. The role of ultrasound, which was widely
used for sex selection earlier, has gone down significantly in recent
times. According to NFHS-3 data it is more evident among the the
wealthiest women than for women in the other wealth quintiles.

So
declining child sex ratio is not only the the result of
“sex-selective abortions”
or “infanticide” but also due to
“sex-selective "stopping
practices" like sterilizaton. And later could be most important
reason b why India is
confronting
with epidemic of missing girls.

How
to gorge ahead?:

Now
question arises why couples avoid a birth of a girl child?
It is widely observed hat growing up as a girl in India is a
challenge in itself. Girl/woman is made to feel like it is all her
fault. It is just like that when investigating crimes of passion,
the French police are said to use the mantra – 'cherchez la
femme' (find the woman) in establishing a motive. This preconceived
notion that whatever the ills afflicting us, from crime to
unemployment, girls/women must be at the root of them is gaining
ground in India's male-oriented society, as noted in the TOI
editorial. 4

Much
of the discrimination is to do with cultural beliefs and social norms
which have become more pronounced in the deteriorating
governance and low and order. There
has been a continuous rise in the incidence of crimes committed
against women over the years. Girls are raped, beaten, dumped even
in the metros like New Dehli. Raising
a girl child in such situation is very difficult. Women who live in
such environment where they are made miserable through injustice and
inequality may not want to raise daughters who will live lives as
unhappy as their own. Women have used this excuse as a rationale for
killing their girl children in the womb or avoiding them. Frankly
and truthfully speaking, in the changed situation, a sizable number
of Indians especially females do not want a female child since female
children in India continue to get a raw deal in most cases. One
can ask questions: Save girl child for what? Eve-teasing? Dowry?
Rapes? Domestic violence? This what we have in store for them. This
is why we want to save them?

This
prevailing view is being supported by Taslima
Nasreen -
a writer, a feminist, and a secular humanist in her thought provoking
article entitled: ”It’s
a girl!” ”Kill her”.5
“The women
who support female feticide say: 'It
is better that an insufferable life ends before it can begin. It is
better to go straight to heaven than stay alive and endure the kicks
and blows of the world.'
Are they wrong in saying this? This society is not a fit place for
girls, so it is better not to allow them to be born”,
argues Nasreen.
Further, in India irrespective
of the caste, creed, religion and social status, the overall status
of a woman is lower than men and therefore a male child is preferred
over a female child. In
such an environment why one should like to have a girl?

What
do one does then?Avani
Bansal, a crusading women's-rights lawyer,
suggests
a radical prescription: “You (girl) should get up, where ever you
are, to show in your own way that society is concerned about the
wrong things. The people around you are focusing on the wrong things.
...Tell them to be concerned not about the length of your skirt, but
the quality of education that they are providing you. Tell them to be
concerned not with how much you mingle with boys, but the equality of
opportunity that they can secure for you.” 6

What
Avani is suggesting that girls ( or women), you raise your voice
against injustice to promote gender equality. Whether this
prescription will work in present India where most of the power is
primary wielded by men? India
ranks 130 out of 155 countries in the Gender Inequality Index (GII)
for 2014, way behind Bangladesh and Pakistan that rank 111 and 121
respectively, according to data in the United National Development
Programme's latest Human Development Report 2015.

It
appears that gender inequality (and discrimination) remains a major
barrier to women empowerment. What do we do then? No doubt, expanding
education and employment opportunities will help in achieving
gender equality but that may take more time. To expedite the
process, “we need men to be allies”, as argued by the Co-Chairman
of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Melinda Gates, in her
recent article, Women Transform Societies, based on Indian
experiences. 7
The Foundation works with partner organizations in India to tackle
critical problems in four areas including issues related with women
and girls in crisis. Expanding her argument, she writes: “women's
empowerment can't be just about women; it also has to be about men
- the fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons – with whom they live
their lives.” it is because in many cases “..it's men who
upholds harmful social norms that stand in women's way”.

So
do not exclude men – fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons, they
have to be positively engaged to be part of the women empowerment
campaign. And such campaign “should drive home the point that
girls are to be celebrated.”, noted by Jayashree Dengl, Executive
Director of Plan India, a community development NGO focusing on
the girl child.

Fortunately,
there are many successful examples of public awareness campaigns in
India that use male role models to promote gender equality, and such
efforts have to be expanded especially in rural areas of north India.

On
top of these grassroots strategies, we have to create conducive
environment for women empowerment at a larger scale and across
economic strata. In my recent paper, Empowering
Women in India:
Need
for a Feminist Agenda, it
is argued that there is an urgent need to formulating
a feminist
agenda to empower women living in highly patriarchal and traditional
surroundings with several obstacles.8
The ‘agenda’ must based on the premises that no doubt efficient
policing, stringent punishments and legal measures would reduce the
incidences of crime against women but these cannot eliminate growing
gender inequality in India unless and until the mindset of the
society is changed. The article suggests that women-centred
reproductive health care along-with enlarged education and employment
opportunities for females may alter patriarchal constructs despite
strong structural resistance. And this feminist agenda will
contribute significantly towards women’s empowerment and reduce
gender gap significantly .

India
is very lucky that present government under the leadership of Prime
Minister Narendra Modi, recognizes that gender equality is part and
parcel of the country's future; and campaigns like “Beti Bachao,
Beti Padhao (Save the girl child, educate the girl child) will help
to arrest the epidemic of missing girls by removing the gender
inequality. This campaign has to deal with issues at the larger scale and across the economic strata by involving men.

1Kothari, Devendra.
2011. Implications of Emerging Demographic Scenario: Based on the
Provisional Results of Census of India 2011, A Brief, a publication
of Management Institute of Population and Development. Parivar Seva
Sanstha, New Delhi.